Jeff Laird, assistant chief engineer at KFDM-TV, said the XDCAM has reduced the amount of media needed to store material in the field.

The station purchased a combination of Sony's PDW-530 XDCAM camcorders and PDW-1500 decks. With the ability to offer a choice of video formats — DVCAM (85 minutes) or MPEG IMX (45 minutes) — while using the same camcorder and media, their producers are able to closely tailor their work to a client's needs.

Laird said the production team was pleasantly surprised at how easy the migration to tapeless production has been. It only required a simple switchover from the facility's legacy Betacam SP systems, he said.